Friday, July 08, 2016

So, there ya go folks. Another peek at the upcoming All City rig to debut on July 18th, as far as I have seen on their Facebook page. (Image courtesy of said page belonging to said All City)
So, pretty obvious that it is a disc brake bike, right? Looks a heck of a lot like a Space Horse, with, you know..........disc brakes. Yeah.
Well, if that is all it is, that wouldn't be a very big surprise. Like I said last week in this space, almost anything saleable these days either has to have disc brakes or "plus" something or another in its name. Not that this is a bad thing, necessarily. But marketing gets on a roll and it seems that all of a sudden all you hear about is "disc brake road bike this" and "plus sized wheels" that. Interestingly, this could all be attributed to one phenomenon that occurred in the last decade.

Stated as briefly as possible, that would be 29"ers and the way the industry did their best to ignore a grassroots trend that just wouldn't go away. Then the industry wished they would've hopped on that "love train" sooner. Because, ya know.......the perception was that they lost out on making sales to some other early adopters.

Anyway..... All City's something or another disc braked, drop barred bike will be revealed soon.

New JET-9 from Niner. Of course it is a "plus" bike, you ninny!

Speaking Of Plus Bikes......

Niner Bikes dropped their "plus" versions of the venerable JET-9 and RIP-9 models. All new, "modern" slack/long geometry with stubby stems/wide bars and lots of travel.
Some media outlets are making a big stink about these not being 29"ers. Whatever...... Click baiters all of 'em. Playing upon people's lack of understanding of tire sizing tradition to get them to read the same press release everyone else is regurgitating. Brilliant.

Anyway, I was just reading about Intense's new FS "plus" bike too. Nice looking rig, and Jeff Steber, the head honch over there, actually was expounding on something you don't hear many companies saying, and is something I was talking about here a while back. That being how it is difficult to get suspension which is intentional, designed to a certain goal, and obviously has damping to work with big, voluminous tires that have very little to no damping and can vary a great deal in how they "suspend" the bike and rider due to air pressure settings. Now that's smart thinking right there, and since Jeff was talking about that, I wonder how other companies approached that issue, or even if they did. To my way of thinking, it would be a critical component of the design for any plus FS trail bike design.

So, yeah........more plus bike stuff!

It's not bad, actually

With Bacon, How Could It Be Bad?

Last year, I think it was, I was chatting with Yuri Hauswald at Gravel Worlds. He'd just won the Dirty Kanza 200 a couple of months prior and, amongst other chit-chat, he was telling me about this new flavor of GU gel called "Maple Bacon". Well, he wasn't so much telling me about it as he was raving about it.

I like bacon, but in a gel packet? I was not convinced that this was anything other than Yuri being loyal to GU and spouting off as an ambassador of the brand. Which is cool. He should do that. I get that about marketing and it doesn't bother me one bit.Fast forward to yesterday at the shop. A sales rep comes in that we are familiar with that reps for GU Energy. By the way, I happen to like and use their stuff. Roctane, Fizz tabs, and GU Chomps are amongst my favorite things they make. So, I was interested in what the rep had to say about GU products. He laid out some packets and they were, of course, the Maple Bacon flavor. So, I figured, what the heck! I tried one and.......

Dang it! It was really good! So, I was all wrong about that one, and Yuri was right. It is that good. Maybe you aren't into bacon because, ya know.....animals, vegetarianism, etc. Well, did you know that this and other GU gels are actually vegan and kosher? That's what the rep said. Weird. How could Maple Bacon taste so good and not have real bacon?

Never underestimate the Power of the Name "Bacon"! <==HA!

Studded. Tubeless. and yes.....in plus sizes!

But Wait! There Is More Plus Tire Stuff To Talk About!!
Readers here may recall back in May I talked about this new tire company that isn't really new, but is "coming out" from behind the curtains to market under their own brand name, Arisun. I mentioned that they will have studded, tubeless tires. Well, I just got word yesterday what they are doing.

The line of tires Arisun is going to bring here are called "Sharktooth" and will consist of the following sizes: A 26" X 4.0" tire in wire bead, folding bead, and "TLR" (tubeless ready) with thread counts ranging from 30, 60, and 120. There will also be a 27.5+ configuration to come. But get this- they are doing a 29" X 2.8" Sharktooth in the same versions as the 26" X 4.0"ers! Did you catch that? A 2.8 inch wide, studded 29"er tire?

Sign me up!

The tubeless version will be killer. And yes......I have a bike that will fit these. By the way, this is another thing I've heard a lot of rumblings about, and may be the next "evolution" of "plus" bikes. That being that 27.5+ and the attendant "Boost" wheel spacing that came along with that has now created a bunch of bikes that probably will fit 29" X 2.5"-2.8" tires, and the industry is going to start pumping out that size tire very soon, as we can see with this Arisun model. So, yeah.........more plus tire stuff!